Gillian Ayres

Gillian Ayres Gillian Ayres (1930 – 2018) was one of the leading abstract painters of her generation. While attending St Paul’s Girls’ School, London, she taught art at weekends to the children of blitzed Stepney. In 1946, at the age of sixteen, she enrolled at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. Ayres exhibited with Young Contemporaries in 1949 and with the London Group in 1951. Her first solo show was at Gallery One, London, in 1956. The following year she was commissioned to create a large-scale mural for South Hampstead High School for Girls. In 1963 her paintings were included in the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s ground-breaking exhibition British Painting in the 60s. As well as the vibrant, heavily worked canvases for which she is best known, she was also a dedicated printmaker.

The first prints by Ayres published by Alan Cristea were a group of three etchings made in 1998. Ayres went on to create ever increasingly ambitious prints in a variety of techniques including etching, woodcut and monoprint. She also developed new methods, working with carborundum and hand-painting at either end of the printing process. In the late 2000’s Ayres began to work with woodblock, delicately layering inked woodblocks onto textured Japanese paper. Ayres’ devotion to making original prints was unremitting, and increased with every year that passed, culminating in a large body of graphic work in her final years which rivaled the magnitude and vividness of her abstract paintings.

Her paintings and prints are held by major museums and galleries around the world including Tate, London; British Museum, London; Arts Council, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Ulster Museum, Belfast; National Museum of Wales, Cardiff; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Fine Art, Boston; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Museum of Modern Art, Brasilia.

Gillian Ayres died aged 88 in April 2018, in North Devon, England.